Ecar Insurance Payout issues HELP PLEASE

[jamiewiles101]

I had my Bmw 3 series stolen of our driveway back in september time and was straight away noted to the police where they gave us a incident number. Iam insured with Ecar or was when i had the car at the time and they were noted and said they would contact us within 2 weeks time to see if the car gets recovered before offering money.

 

Them weeks past and they asked me to send in Mot , V5 , Keys and service history and everything which was related to the car in documents.

 

I sent that straight away as this is what Ecar have asked me todo so they could value what the car was worth and wait for a sum so they could offer us the payout for the stolen car.

 

I had a official letter headed from Ecar saying the ammount the would offer was £3000 and to ring to acceptt or write a letter. Well we did phone and acceptt the offer, Thinking nothing off it and they said wait and you will recieve your cheque in the post.

 

We waited for upto 4 weeks by then it was november time, and we had a phone call saying there was a problem with the insurance and could mean there could be a issue with the insurance and them paying out because my son of 20 years age, done the online quote and took the policy out online.

 

And what they was saying is that because he put me the mother and him as my son as us being related as spouse the refuse to pay out and they didnt tell us this till Jan 09 as they kept making us wait and wait. And i said it was a genuine mistake you can take off whatever the difference it would of been thats not a problem but we paying car insurance so we want the service.

 

He put that we were both single Not married and the last part when it said how are you related to the policy holder Main holder , and he thought spouse was family related not married husband and wife. So they now are refusing to payout and have sent all documents back to us, How can they justify 3000 pound all taken away.

 

Please help not a clue what we can do.

 

Any help would be much helpfull! Thank You

Edited May 14, 2012 by MARTIN3030

[Wulfyn]

Hi Jamie,

 

this is a common problem with non-face-to-face transactions where genuine mistakes are made. From a purely 100% technical point of view Esure are correct in saying that you were not covered correctly. However things like this fall into a grey area because obviously the mistake was not huge and so the risk of the cover was not significantly different.

 

As a bit of background, insurance is priced on a purely statistical basis taking into account performance and competitiveness. This is the only way that you can charge different prices for different sexes / ages and not be accused of discrimination (agism is now so illegal that a birthday card sent at work should not have that person's age on them!). However insurance does not stop there and uses a number of other seemingly unrelated rating factors, such as marital status, how long you have had the car, and at one time even what colour it was.

 

Now the reason I am saying this is because usually "Insured and Spouse" policies perform significantly better than either "Insured Only" or "Insured and Named" policies. Last time I was pricing motor insurance we saw that Insured and Spouse was around 10%-15% better than Insured Only, whilst Insured and Named was around 5% worse. Therefore you give a discount.

 

The problem is that if everyone lied to get this discount then the Insurance company would lose money, even if they recovered the lost premium from just those that claim. This is because your insurance is not just to cover you, but to cover everyone else insured by that company. Therefore in order to prevent this they can't just ask for the premium difference, they have to refute the claim.

 

Now sometimes this is done deliberately, and this sort of fraud is thought to add around 20% on to everyone's insurance premium. However sometimes genuine mistakes are made. The problem is that the insurance company cannot tell which is which - and to be honest I don't think they are really interested as if they have a basis to try and refuse a claim they will take it.

 

 

Your biggest weapon is that your son put both of you as being single. This is not just importnat from an intelligent point of view in you arguing the mistake, but also from a technological point of view. The reason is that their system should in no way accept the relationship as Spouse if both drivers on the policy are Single. There is no way that this can be correct, and the Esure system should either have flagged it up as a mistake and prevented you from doing it, or they should have referred the risk to their underwriting team to investigate.

 

As a further note the FSA are more often than not on the side of the general public than the insurance companies when it comes to a claim like this, where the risk is not significantly different. They state that it is not treating the customer fairly to refuse the entire claim because of small mistakes where deliberate fraud cannot be proven. Now "treating the customer fairly" might seem a bit of a weak statement but it's actually an FSA regualtion that all insurance companies have a TCF set of rules in place which they absolutely 100% have to abide by (or it's big fine time).

 

 

So to take this forward I would send a letter to Esure's compliance officer. State that it was a genuine mistake which Esure's system should not have allowed to have happened because you cannot have an Insured and Spouse policy where both policyholders are single. Say that by allowing this risk to be written Esure are putting their customers at risk of not being covered due to a genuine mistake, and that this is not treating the customer fairly. I mean imagine if you had hit someone

 

 

Good luck with this - I'm confident you can get a good response from this. If the compliance officer is no help then you will need to escalate this to the FSO, so let us know what the reply is.

[jamiewiles101]

They refused to pay out still that was by going to the compliance officer,

 

they said i should of read the agreement before hand before taking out the insurance cover

[Wulfyn]

Well again technically they are rigt, but this is a contract between wo parties, and thus they should have read it as well.

 

 

Stick to your guns - press the compliance officer on why they were allowed to sell a policy that was not allowable, ie two single people requesting Insured and Spouse cover.

 

 

 

To give some more information, high street brokers and many telephone brokers use special software to generate the quotes they give you from the information provided. These are handled by companies called Software Houses, who take the rates from the underwriting insurer, package them up and then sell them to brokers to use. In my job i get to access these software packages daily because all the underwriters that use this have an agreement with a company called ISL that make a program called WhatIf? that allows us to test our rates against the market.

 

If I were to enter a quote on WhatIf? using 2 people whose marital status was single, and tried to claim that either they were related as Spouse or tried to get Insured and Spouse cover then all the products would decline or refer, with the reason being that they must be married to be a spouse, and the relationship must be spouse (or civil partnership) to get insured and spouse cover.

 

They do this because they know that such a policy is not enforceable, and the Software Houses actually do a pretty good job of testing things like this to make sure that mistakes don't occur. Now direct sellers don't always have these systems, especially when sold over the internet or when they have their own special panel of underwriters. I don't know what ECar's situation is, but it should give you confidence to know that there are very few companies where mistakes like these can be made with regard to standing up for yourself and saying to ECar that they ballsed it up.

 

 

Good luck and keep us informed!

[jamiewiles101]

what you reccomend , to fire at them ?

 

which would scare them into thinking how i know alot about the insurance side? i want something i know will make them think twice who they are messing with.

 

Like using certain words only insurance people would understand etc.

 

thanks

[silverfox1961]

Hi andypa38

 

While I may sympathise with your situation, going on a rant won't do much to help you.

 

Why not start your own thread, lay things out in a factual and non-emotive way and I'm sure peeps will assist.

[andypa38]

"I have recently made libellous comments about Brightside Group plc, its business and its insurance brands, being as eCar, eBike, eInsurance, eVan, eHome, eLife, eTravel, eLadyDriver and ePet . I now accept that my comments were baseless and that there was no truth to them. I would therefore like to apologise to Brightside Group plc, its subsidiaries, its associated companies, its shareholders and its employees for attempting to discredit the company and its business in any way, and for any distress or inconvenience caused by my comments."